


Wandwork

by TheAlemBooks



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Auror Neville Longbottom, Awkwardness, BAMF Neville Longbottom, But she Dead so, But that's not really in this fic so sorry, Dark Mark, Diagon Alley, Dom Neville Longbottom, Draco Malfoy Needs a Hug, Families of Choice, Flirting, Good Draco Malfoy, Good Narcissa Black Malfoy, I Will Go Down With This Ship, Iceland, Implied/Referenced Prostitution, M/M, Oblivious Draco Malfoy, On the Run, POV Draco Malfoy, Rare Pairings, Shops, Sorry Not Sorry, There need to be more long form Neville/Draco but I'm not the one to do them, Wandlore, Wandmaker, Wandmaker Draco Malfoy, because i'm busy writing my own books, minor characters - Freeform, old people, too many tags
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-12
Updated: 2017-06-12
Packaged: 2019-06-07 10:01:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,960
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15216728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheAlemBooks/pseuds/TheAlemBooks
Summary: In Draco’s fourth year, Narcissa Malfoy falls ill much like her own mother did at her age, and in Draco’s fifth year, she dies.In his sixth year, the Dark Lord asks him to kill Dumbledore and when he fails at that, he leaves his wand at home, burns the tattoo on his arm until he can’t feel anymore, and runs. At first, his father, Death Eaters, the Ministry, and even the Order try to find him, but after three months on the run, hopping from France and Belgium to Prague and Hungary at one point,  Draco settles himself in a quiet town in Iceland, where the magical community has a population of three.This is where things get interesting.





	Wandwork

In Draco’s fourth year, Narcissa Malfoy falls ill much like her own mother did at her age, and in Draco’s fifth year, she dies. In his sixth year, the Dark Lord asks him to kill Dumbledore and when he fails at that, he leaves his wand at home, burns the tattoo on his arm until he can’t feel anymore, and runs. At first, his father, Death Eaters, the Ministry, and even the Order try to find him, but after three months on the run, hopping from France and Belgium to Prague and Hungary at one point,  Draco settles himself in a quiet town in Iceland, where the magical community has a population of three, one of them being Draco himself.

Mr. Jakob and Mrs. Agnes, an old couple of eighty, take him in with open arms, but grim faces. Like him, they know what lays beyond the sea, what evil lurks in England. Mrs. Agnes teaches him magic, or at least as much as she can in her age, and Mr. Jakob lets him help with his work. Mr. Jakob is a small, but surprisingly wealthy, wand maker, who specializes in Thestral core wands and it only takes twenty minutes of Mr. Jakob detailing the basic complexities of wands before Draco is drawn into the magic. After that, Draco spends less time with Mrs. Agnes and more with Mr. Jakob. He knows from his old wand made of Hawthorn that he was a mess, that his conflicted sixth year was inevitable and that, like the Unicorn hair core, he bonded with the wand and misses it terribly.

However, something about his new eleven inch, Pine, White River Monster Spine, slightly springy wand made him grin. The Pine, which are typically held by independent, perceived loners, were meant to be used creatively and for new methods and spells, were sensitive to non-verbal magic which Draco had become adept at, and were best used by those who would live long lives. The White River Monster Spine core would produce spells of force and elegance and slightly springiness of his wand reminded him of his adaptability of being on the run, of switching sides, of dying his hair brown and wearing silly Muggle clothes in order to hide, of degrading himself for money, passage, and food, it all added up to him. Draco Malfoy, the boy who refused to fall in line to a complete idiot with a prissy wand that wouldn’t bow unless blood was shed.

In May, after months of apprenticing for Mr. Jakob and practicing his defensive spells with Ms. Agnes, the scar of his mark twinges. The botched skin still twinges on dreary days, reminding him of his past, but the evening of May 1st, the scar burns, the tattoo pulling taut beneath the scar, causing him to fall to the floor in his bedroom. He ushers down the hall to the door, swinging on his black jacket and leaving a note for the couple that he’ll be back, and apparates to Hogwarts. The ground is already messy with blood and dead bodies and Draco, with his still slightly brown hair and his Backstreet Boys’ t-shirt and green trainers, pulls out his pine wand and begins throwing off spell after spell towards Death Eaters that he vaguely recognizes and defending himself against former classmates until they realize that he’s on  _ their _ side and begin watching his back as well.

It isn’t until it’s  _ over _ \--and goddamn, the weight that eases off of him, the throbbing of his arm with that sonofabitch, murdering, psychopath dead as his mother and dead as his father, it all falls into place and makes him sigh as if he’s finally done something good for once--that someone actually decides to go over to him and talk to him.

For some reason it’s Longbottom.

“Malfoy?” he says, squinting his eyes at Draco. The boy is much taller than Draco remembered. And  _ built _ , Salazar, what happened to Shlongbottom?

Longbottom is still staring at him so Draco coughs and mumbles out a yes.

“Bloody hell, where’ve you been?”

“On the run.”

“We thought you were dead!”

Draco barks out a laugh. He remembers the first few months away, the way he was desperate for cash at all times and always looking over his shoulder, finding shady strangers in alleys that always wanted something from him, the way his skin clung to his bones, the way hunger was less of a discomfort and a reminder that he was still living. “It sure felt that way.”

“Well, where were you?” Longbottom sits across from him on the bench and Draco moves to patch him up without prompt.

He shrugs. “I was around for a while. Settled in Iceland.”

“Iceland?”

“Yeah…”

Longbottom will need a real doctor soon if that head wound was anything to go by. “Are there wizards there?”

“Only two.”

“Two?”

“Yes, two.”

“Wow.”

Longbottom sways, even while sitting, and Draco stands him up to get him proper medical attention. It’s early in the morning and Mrs. Agnes will be waking up soon. Draco drops Longbottom off with a mediwitch and moves to leave the Great Hall-- _ ah, so many memories _ \--and back to Iceland, passing a bloody Harry Potter on his way out.

His portkey back is late on arrival and Mrs. Agnes frets when he walks into the little house since he had no time to cover up his injuries. When Mr. Jakob walks in, the fretting turns into fussing, which turns into crying and hugging as Draco explains where he was and what he saw,  who he killed and who died. The rest of the month is spent reading the  _ Daily Prophet _ , healing his wounds, and planning for his trip.

For the next four years, with monthly visits back to Iceland, Draco travels the world in search of experimental wand materials. Mr. Jakob funds him greatly in the hopes that Draco will find new methods and properties of wand magic. Most of Draco’s destinations were based on myths and whispers. There had been legends of a small forest in South Korea, whose tree limbs, even when cut and carved, remained a dark green that glowed at the touch of a wizard, and Draco spent two months in search of such tree until he found it. And in South Africa, local wizards reported that ground up eastwoodae shells, when sanded along their wands, improved their healing magic. And in Peru, an urban legend murmured that a jaguar's tooth embedded at the base of the wand would enhance a warrior's ferocity. And everywhere he went, he would cut samplings of all sorts of trees, vines, plants, animal teeth, shells anything really so that he could experiment and test. Unlike Ollivander and his hazelnut wood and unicorn hair, Draco was unrestricted by his imagination of what a wand could be and nothing anyone did would stop him.

When he’s twenty one, he returns to England after two months back in Iceland, to set up shop in Diagon Alley. Four years after the war, and so many people are still in need of wands so Draco opens Erro Wands and has his friend Amira, who he met in a village in Pakistan, sells typical wands to the daily customers as he experiments in the back. 

Draco has all kinds of experiments about the manufacturing of wands. His first few experiments involve the implementation of wand cores in identical wands. He learns, through correspondence with Mr. Jakob, that inserting the core from tip to base instead of base to tip has no effect and that unsurprisingly, a cut up core strand will allow the wand to function but crumble after a few flicks and that a wand with multiple core strands of unicorn hair, will combust at the first swish. However, liquidizing the second core and coating the first strand will improve the overall strength of magic and splitting the wand in half and gluing the two halve back together with the core pressed in between won’t necessarily combust after the first swish, but will work perfectly fine for almost all bits of magical except Defense. 

All of those experiments are with Unicorn hair and Draco has to triple check those experiments and investigate the properties of other common core types, and later the uncommon ones when he has the time, to understand the complexities of cores. At first he uses only Chestnut for its versatile nature in character, but then he also has to branch out to the other woods and vines that he’s picked up, documenting all of his research in a well-written and duplicated notebook with many correspondences with Mr. Jakob.

They do so much research on the basic core variations and wand wood potentiality, that by the time Draco is twenty-seven, he has slight lines around his face, but a successful wand shop and three books on wands under his belt, all authored by his pseudonym D. Jakobsson since in true Icelandic fashion, takes Mr. Jakob’s, who Draco considers his father and colleague, name as his last name. All of his dedications are to Mrs. Agnes’s specialty cakes and Mr. Jakob’s favorite wand woods. Amira and Henry, the boy joined the staff of Erro Wands after three years of successful business, handle the store quite nicely, keeping up the allure of who D. Jakobsson and never spilling the details of who owns the nice shop to any curious customers. It’s not that Draco has any real reason to hide, but he would rather not let his damned father’s Malfoy name touch anything as pure and wholesome as Draco’s passion. Only Draco’s fellow wand colleagues know him by his true name and he has many, often in distant countries like Paraguay and Sri Lanka, who owl him every few months about his experiments and their potential wand cores and woods they would like him to test.

Draco is twenty-nine and experimenting with soaking the wands in different elixirs and pollens while simultaneously testing the properties of wands with hybrid cores and woods when Neville Longbottom walks back into his life. It is a normal day in early June and Draco is returning from sending off his latest notes and wands to Mr. Jakob, who despite his youthful mind, is getting a little frail for carving anymore wands and especially wrangling anymore Thestral hair cores, but is still able to review Draco’s notes every time and test his wands out in the wilderness of Iceland. Draco, who thinks the shop is closed for it’s lunch break, opens the front door to find Henry handing Longbottom two boxes of Apple wood wands.

“Ah, Mr. Malfoy, how was your trip?” Henry asks. Despite only being only a few years younger than Draco, Henry always calls him sir and Mr. Malfoy to his chagrin. 

Longbottom turns around curiously.

“It was fine, Henry.” Draco stands awkwardly at the front of the shop. He’s not sure if Henry and him should pursue their usual charade in front of customers whenever Draco is almost caught, where Henry pretends to get him wands and Draco pretends to be a snobbish prat, or not. It’s not like he knows Longbottom or anything, but something about pretending to be an annoying git like he was in his early youth makes him cringe. Luckily, Longbottom solves his dilemma for him.

“Coming in to buy a wand, Malfoy?”

Draco moves a bit closer, his shoulders still hunched. “Ah, yes…Henry, do you have any Dogwood?”

Henry raises his brow. Sometimes, Draco will talk in wand woods and cores, the secret meaning of wands. Dogwood is for mischievous persons and in context, he’s asking Henry to play along with whatever he says. 

“Yes, sir. Some Sycamores too.”

Sycamores are for questers, those that like a good adventure. Henry will play along because it’s something new and exciting. Draco nods.

“Very well then.”

Henry moves into the back and Longbottom picks up his two Apple wands. Apple wood is not a fairly common wand wood, but it is for powerful users with high aims and ideals, who will live long and be well-loved. It’s interesting to find one with Longbottom’s hands wrapped around them, but he hasn’t seen the boy--well, man now--for quite some years. Longbottom swishes the wand and the floorboards shift under them in a loud squeak. Longbottom puts the wand down.

“Maybe not for me,” Longbottom grins.

“You know, owners of Apple wands are unusually capable of talking with native creatures in their own tongues.”

“Well that’s a bit odd. Where'd you hear that?”

Draco shrugs. “Read it in a book somewhere.” Actually, Draco had read that in an old tome, but then he interviewed extensively all of his Apple wand buyers, through Amira of course, and found startling evidence of not only that, but from other interviews, that Fir wand users were better suited at escaping hazardous situations and Laurel wands zapped thieves. 

Longbottom picks up the other Apple wand, but not much happens. Longbottom turns a lovely shade of pink, Draco observes. “Well, I guess, I better try a different wand shouldn’t I?”

Draco nods, thinking. What would Longbottom be best suited for? He thinks for a moment or two about what he remembers of Longbottom in school and of the many  _ Prophet _ articles about the Auror, or at least the few he had read some Sunday mornings, and decides Pear wood might be best. Owners are typically warm-hearted, generous, wise, well-respected, and very resilient. Pear wood has also never been in the hands of a dark wizard and Draco recalls a particular Pear wand that he made two years ago with its Unicorn tail hair core dipped in lavender and its length twelve inches that might be perfect for Longbottom.

Henry comes back out with two fake boxes of wands for Draco and another Apple wand for Longbottom and Draco shakes his head at the younger man.

“Actually, Henry,” he says, “would you mind getting Mr. Longbottom here the Pear wand with the lavender-Unicorn, slightly springy, and twelve inches?”

Henry nods, “Yes, sir,” and moves back out of the front of the shop.

Longbottom turns to him. “I guess you’re not here to get a wand?”

“Astute observation, Mr. Longbottom.”

“You own this shop?”

Draco doesn’t quite know what about Longbottom makes him want to be truthful and expose the well-kept parts of himself, but it might have something to do with his soft smile. And his broad shoulders, those were definitely influential. “Yes.”

“Wow, I’ve been coming here for years and I didn’t even know.”

Draco frowned. “How often do you break your wand, Longbottom?”

Longbottom laughed. “Aurors, you get it, right? I’m sure Harry and Ron’ve been here quite a few times.” Draco was just about to tell him how many times the two extraordinaires have bumbled into his shop, but Longbottom gets a glint in his eye and says casually, “You can call me Neville, by the way.”

Draco blinks. It feels, at that exact moment, like the collar of his purple robes are tightening around his throat, and as if the temperature controlled room heats up. “Okay…Neville.”  

Henry comes out with the wand in question. “Here you go, sir,” he offers the box to Neville.

The man smiles and pulls out the beautifully crafted wand. Draco remembers constructing that batch of lavender infused wands. It had been late in the winter and he was visiting Mr. Jakobs and Mrs. Agnes for the holidays. The old man had clapped Draco on the back and had complimented him on his work ethic. Seeing Neville hold the wand, a man nice and true, makes Draco feel at peace. Neville looks to Draco.

“Well, what are you waiting for? Give it a swish.”

Neville smiles and does as he’s told. With the flick of his wrist, the shop is awashed in a soft orange glow. Neville grins down at the wand and then at Draco. “Looks like it works.”

“Of course it  _ works _ ,” Draco snorts, “I made it.”

The Auror laughs and pulls out some money to hand to Henry. Draco waves him aside.

“It’s on the house, Neville.”

“Oh, no, I couldn’t possibly--”

“Neville,” Draco tells him seriously; distantly he registers that Henry has left to go return the other boxes, “I don’t mind. It’s always nice to see a wand go to a proper wizard.”

There seems to be a pinkness to Neville’s cheeks, but Draco might also be turning into an old senile man. Wand fumes and all that. Draco nods at the man and moves to go behind the counter and up to his work space.

“Actually, Draco?”

Draco stops and looks back. “Yes?”

“Um, what time does your shop close up?”

“Eight, why?”

“Well, I was thinking I’d might like to take you out to dinner.”

Draco blinks in surprise, almost taken aback. Was that a date? From Auror, broad chested, Hogwarts’s hero, all around Gryffindor, Neville Longbottom? For  _ him _ ? Draco knows he is a perfectly fine man. He escaped the clutches of his father, the Dark Lord, all the prejudicial shit that used to weigh him down, and he’s made a life for himself as a wandmaker, and yet and yet. 

“Excuse me?”

“Like a date?” Neville looks so hopeful. No one has ever looked so hopeful when it came to Draco.

He gulps. Then he thinks, fuck it, why not? “Alright, Neville, I know a great Thai place. Come by around seven thirty, I’ll have Amira close up shop.”

“So it’s a date?” 

Draco laughs. “Yes, it’s a date, Neville.”

Neville smils. “Awesome.”

He couldn’t help but think he could get quite used to that sort of smile. Neville is, in fact, surprisingly charming.

 


End file.
